Cultural Globalization

Cultural Globalization

1) Summarize
It may seem a rather obvious point to begin with, but to understand the meaning and character of ‘cultural globalization’ I first have to understand some defining features of the two constituent terms. At its most basic, globalization is quite simply a description of these networks and of their implications: of the ‘flows’ around them – and across international boundaries – of virtually everything that characterizes modern life: flows of capital, commodities, people, knowledge, information and ideas, crime, pollution, diseases, fashions, beliefs, images and so forth. So understanding globalization as a generalized process of increasing connectedness helps us to keep in mind the multidimensional complexity of the process. So the first reason to resist the temptation to economic reductionism is that it operates on an unrealistically narrow conception of the economic. The second reason is that it distorts our understanding of the sphere of culture. Common expressions like ‘the impact of globalization on culture’ or ‘the cultural consequences of globalization’ contain a tacit assumption that globalization is a process which somehow has its sources and its terrain of operation outside of culture. To clarify this, I have to probe a little more into the peculiarly complicated and often elusive concept of culture. ‘Culture is not a power, something to which social events can be causally attributed’ says Clifford Geertz and this is surely right to the extent that we should think of cultural processes primarily as oriented towards the construction of socially shared meanings.
One common speculation about the globalization process is that it will lead to a single global culture. This is only a speculation, but the reason it seems possible is that we can see the ‘unifying’ effects of connectivity in other spheres – particularly in the economic sphere where the tightly integrated system of the global market provides the model. And indeed, globalization in some of its aspects does have this general unifying character.

2) Interesting items I learned
A different way of approaching these issues is to view contemporary globalization in the context of a much longer historical context in which societies and cultures have imagined the world as a single place, with their own culture at the center of it. This sort of imagination has been a consistent feature of the founding narratives of cultural collectivities – particularly of faith communities – and we can learn something appropriate to the contemporary situation from a brief consideration of a couple of historical examples. I am interesting this part. Before I learned this material, I didn’t know globalization’s historical context.

3) Discussion point
An alternative perspective on cultural globalization emphasizes the transfiguration of worldwide diversity into a pandemic of Westernized consumer culture. Some critics argue that the dominance of American culture influencing the entire world will ultimately result in the end of cultural diversity. Such cultural globalization may lead to a human monoculture. This process, understood as cultural imperialism, is associated with the destruction of cultural identities, dominated by a homogenized and westernized, consumer culture. The global influence of American products, businesses and culture in other countries around the world has been referred to as Americanization. This influence is represented through that of American-based television programs which are rebroadcast throughout the world. Major American companies such as McDonald's and Coca-Cola have played a major role in the spread of American culture around the globe. Terms such as Coca-colonization have been coined to refer to the dominance of American products in foreign countries, which some critics of globalization view as a threat to the cultural identity of these nations.